A Whirlwind Vacation!

The picture above was taken at St.Basils Church also known as the Church of Resurrection, which is right outside of red square. It was so amazing looking!

Russia was absolutely gorgeous! I went to St.Petersburg and Moscow, each for about 5 days. The summer brings 'White Nights' to St. Petersburg which means that the sun only goes down for about 2 hours! Yep, that's right! From only about 11:30-1:30 it's dark! St.Petersburg was so pretty. Peter the Great visited Europe during his tzardom and fell in love with venice. So he decided to top it. He built huge canals throughout the city and his summer palace (Peterhof) is modeled after Versailles.

Moscow was much more city-like. The stylistic changes of the city from pre-peter, to western style to Soviet style to modern buildings was astounding. During the Soviet Era a lot of apartments were built very quickly and they look like a bunch of pre-fab blocks stacked on top of each other. It was scary looking.

I do want to mention that Moscow and St.Petersburg are not indicative of the entire Former Soviet Union nor Russia. Even though I saw plenty of wealth, I was told numerous times that it is mainly in these two cities that people are living well. The outskirts of the country are having rough times.
This is just a quick card that I whipped up this morning. The Notebook Paper Backgrounder is inked in Bashful Blue and is from Cornish Heritage Farms. It is one of my favorite stamps and is so great for graduation cards as well as teacher thank yous. Next I stamped the House Mouse Graduation stamp in Black Staz-on. I colored it with Tombows, which are water based markers on 110 lb water color paper. The 'Happy Graduation' stamp is from Hero Arts. I actually got it on clearance for like $1! The bling is from Michaels.

Well, I'm off to run errands. I managed to sleep through the night so I am hoping it won't be hard to adjust back to eastern standard time.

Ely